


reminding me of who i killed (inside my dream)

by hidefromeveryone



Series: Bandom One-Shots [9]
Category: Twenty One Pilots
Genre: Blood and Injury, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Implied/Referenced Sex, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Smoking, Trans Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-23
Updated: 2017-05-23
Packaged: 2018-11-03 23:28:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 954
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10977624
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hidefromeveryone/pseuds/hidefromeveryone
Summary: It's a summer day, in a forgotten corner of Ohio, in a forgotten year.Two forgotten boys sit beside each other, and wait.





	reminding me of who i killed (inside my dream)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [edy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/edy/gifts).



> i want to die. i wrote this instead. 
> 
> stay safe friendos.

“Hey,” he says, with sleeves pushed up to his elbows and a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. There’s a small burn - or cut - on that corner of his mouth, that trickles strawberry-pink blood down his chin and hosts a hanging, rotting scab. 

His fingernails are strawberry-pink, too. They’re holding his phone, a lighter, a bruised apple. The weed is hiding in his backpack under layers of dirty clothes and an old paperback book written by a forgotten pseudonym. 

“Hey,” he says back, with sleeves pulled down past his knuckles and teeth biting through the flesh of his chapped and cracking lips. His blood is burnt-orange and staining his back molars where the holes in his cheeks leak and pool. His tongue is littered with chartreuse false mold and his breath smells nicer than his body. 

His thighs are burnt-orange and chocolate chip brown, chaffing against cut-off jean shorts and boxers from Goodwill. His pockets are full of rusting scrap metal and scrapbooking knives alongside drumsticks and twisted headphones. 

They’re sitting on a wooden fence behind the old high school, where condom wrappers and empty beer bottles reside. Their legs are swinging, knocking against the cracked and shoddy artificial wood. It’s late summer, when time moves faster than it does in April and slower than it does in October. The sun is burning their skin into tan, flaking wafers, infecting their cells with ideas of cancer. The lake nearby is full of algae and soda cans, seaweed and barracudas. It’s said to be made of water, but it’s usually made of sewage. 

He’s lighting up now, offering the bong to his boyfriend with shaking hands and split knuckles. His smile is lopsided, the wounded corner rising open and screaming in agony as he hides his teeth, raised his eyebrows. They used to be shaped, but stray hairs are running across his skull and behind his corneas into his brain. Burnt-orange nails stain the skin of the apple as his boyfriend accepts the offering, digging moons into the soft skin of the fruit. It feels like late nights, the digging of his fingers into his boyfriend’s strawberry-pink hips and the kissing of his cherry-red chest. The apple is already bruised where his boyfriend is not. 

“I’ve been thinking,” he says, kicking up clods of dirt from the dried-up earth and ripping splinters of bark from his perch on the fence. “About you. About Christmas.” 

He’s taken the bong back from his boyfriend now, slipping it back into place beside his phone, the dripping accelerator. His dress is made of velvet satin, and his converse are made of hardened canvas. The binder on his chest is made of spandex and cotton, and he knows he’s made of regret and indecision. 

“Thinking’s dangerous,” he says, before dropping his cigarette into the fading grasses and stamping out the small flames that burst forth from hell. He won’t meet his boyfriend’s eyes, running his fingers through the small hairs adorning his scalp. “What about me? About then?” 

His boyfriend’s drumsticks are out now, tapping out an irregular rhythm against his split boots and burnt shins. It sounds like the melody of a reworked love song, one that used to be about first meetings and now laments last embraces. The flat tire of his bike led to its collapse against the fence next to him. He doesn’t know how he’s getting home, if he’s going to go through with it, if his sister has found him yet. 

“That you needed help,” he whispers, digging his fingers under the loose layers of skin and muscle lying atop his bones. His tank top is soaked with sweat, his bile. His hands are shaking, too. “That Christmas was the last time I saw you breathing.” 

His boyfriend’s lighter is staining his dress with the fluorescent, holographic fluid; it’s dripping down his thighs and soaking into his epidermis, his veins. There’s matches in his backpack, next to the journal pages of notes and apologies. He perches the sticks between his teeth, the heads touching his tongue as he hums a song. The melody is haunting, made of off-beats and juvenile hours spent in prison. It clashed with the drumstick rhythm as he lit the fire and felt his skin peel away from his skeleton and sizzle with the smell of decaying flesh. His strawberry-pink is turning into sunshine-yellow as his phantom whimpers echo in their eardrums. 

“I’m only dead, Josh,” he says as his jaw fractures and falls into the earth. His muscles are fraying and twisting as the fat on his bones decays in the air. The mosquitoes of summer are collecting on his corpse, eating what still remains. The flames are made of ocean-blue and forest-green. “I’m still here.” 

His bones are tangled in the tattered rags of his dress, the arches in his feet breaking through the melting Chinese plastic. His boyfriend’s arms are covered in midnight-purple wounds and sluggish, beating time as the iron liquid paints his shorts with a new paint-splatter pattern. His arms are made of caverns and ravines as he screams at the birds pecking at his eyes. 

“But I’m not,” Josh says, easing his body onto the ground as his legs collapse and knock against the fence behind his vessel. His bike is made of rainbow swirls and forgotten memories, its basket full of old cassettes and t-shirt turned into Pinterest crop tops. He’s eighteen, or nineteen, or somewhere in between a statistic on a fact sheet and a grave drunk punk rockers piss on after a bad concert. Stars are exiting his veins and entering the atmosphere as his breath turns into the smoke of his boyfriend’s cigarette. “I needed help, too, Tyler.”

**Author's Note:**

> tumblr: @hidefromeveryone
> 
> work title taken from: "car radio" by twenty one pilots


End file.
